Project where collection lands at term close from where it stands now, using a curve rather than a straight line — because collection clusters around instalment dates and decelerates, so extrapolating a mid-term rate linearly overstates the final figure every time.
A projection, not a commitment. A fee revision, a changed instalment date or new reminder practice all break the curve it assumes.
A bursar at week nine with 67% collected wants to know where the term ends. The instinct is to scale up by the fraction of term remaining, and that answer is consistently too high — because the weeks already past contained the instalment dates and the weeks ahead mostly do not.
Collection is front-loaded. The first instalment falls due early, a large share of families pay close to it, and the curve then flattens as what remains is increasingly the hard part — families in genuine difficulty, disputed amounts, and reimbursements that have not landed.
Scaling a week-nine rate by sixteen-ninths assumes the remaining seven weeks collect at the same pace as the first nine. They do not, and a budget built on that assumption plans to receive money that historically does not arrive.
The projection is most useful as a trigger rather than a forecast. A projected close materially below your own prior year is a signal to look at what changed — an instalment date moved, reminders not going out, a new fee structure families are querying — while there is still term left to act.
It is not a reason to chase harder indiscriminately. The families who have not paid by week nine are not a homogeneous group, and treating them as one is how schools generate complaints without generating collections.
Phrased the way they arrive, answered so each one stands on its own.
Because collection decelerates. The straight-line figure is shown alongside the curve figure so you can see how much more optimistic it is at your point in the term.
The elapsed fraction of the term raised to the power 0.55, which approximates how school fee collection actually runs. It is an approximation and the page says so.
Run it per campus. Campuses have different instalment calendars and collection behaviour, and averaging them produces a projection that describes none of them.
Checked by the Implementations desk on 6 September 2026. Corrections go in the page, dated, rather than quietly.
Pricing is on the page, in the open, with the counting rule written next to it. Nobody has to book a call to find out what it costs.
See pricingForty minutes with an implementation engineer — your classes, your fee heads, your grading scheme, entered as we go. No slides, no sample school.